coming up this hour on earth drumming up fear through deception c.n.n. misses the mark when it comes to its coverage of iran choosing to cut president ahmadinejad off abruptly while airing the entirety of prime minister netanyahu the speech will ask the journal's amber lyon to grade c.n.n.'s coverage of the middle east. and it was supposed to be a last resort to force bipartisan cooperation on a budget plan but today sequester ation is looking more and more like a reality the first cut could be the best the military has ever seen that story coming up. plus president obama promised he'd crack down on the banks responsible for the mortgage backed security fraud two years later justice may finally be

served but it might not be the change you were looking for and the timing of it all could not be more convenient we'll tell you more. it's tuesday october second eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching artsy. well perhaps two of the most talked about speeches from the united nations general assembly or from the leaders of two duelling nations that's israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu and iranian president mahmoud ahmadinejad of course netanyahu how that unforgettable cartoon bomb with a clear red line drawn his speech was aired in full on multiple mainstream networks iran speech however was cut short and that means viewers didn't get to see this. that is

a new. and fresh way i think you're an older. woman . now. you're going to. perfection i. want to go in order which is why i was a little. sick you. always walk around going over there. and. i thought it is a sacred gift from. now missions like that make all the difference in how the iranian leader is portrayed i mean the difference between a warmonger and someone opposed to war so what else is isn't being reported and one

of the remicade ramifications of this kind of selective reporting to discuss this i was joined by amber lyon three time award winning emmy award winning journalist photographer and filmmaker. well i were really worried here that the united states public is being led into another potential conflict with iran the similar way that we were led into the iraq and afghanistan wars because you're starting to see the mainstream media really overhyped the situation in iran and omit important facts like what you just showed liz where i was saying that there are options for peace but if you go back and you look at the way that c.n.n. and other mainstream outlets covered that they nord that part of the speech and and if you look at all the propaganda being fed to the american public right now in terms of iran we have movies here coming out argo we've got the mainstream media over saturation of coverage of the iran situation and you know based on everything

that's happening here in the u.s. with the mortgage crisis the economy the fact that most americans are having problems just getting by day to day the fact that the mainstream media is over covering iran only says one thing to me and that's that the american public is being propagated into another war liz and why do you think that this is happening. well i think that it's a use of propaganda and this is something that goes back to the terms weapons of mass destruction the american public was fed that phrase over and over and over leading into the iraq war and now we're starting to see it as far as nuclear weapons and iran goes in the us. and i just fear the public is continuing to be fed propaganda that unassuming americans don't realize they're being fed to to lead us into another potential conflict now the job of the media is supposed to be you know this fourth estate and to you know show you know all

possible angles and basically just to report the truth what do you think it is i know that you work for c.n.n. why would it be otherwise why would they be presenting war propaganda as you call it. well i really can't speculate as to exactly why this is going on but i can tell you that when i was working for c.n.n. we did have a documentary that we aired on the buffering situation and that's where we have our naval base which is right across from iran so we strategically want to keep that naval base and it was very difficult to get stories on about buffering i even came out a couple weeks ago talking about the censorship of that documentary on c.n.n. international and above all is that i feel that the american public is not being fed the true story about what's going on in this region and it's very dangerous because when the public is constantly fed messages that are potentially

leading us into a war that may not be necessary it's not fair to the american people and it's not fair to journalism because the truth isn't being told here what's being told here is the way that these networks want to spin the truth and that's leading us into another potential conflict with iran and i've been trying to tell my followers on my facebook page and on twitter to really open your eyes because once you notice and start to you take the blindfold off you start to see all of this. propaganda floating through the american mainstream media and and it's symbolic of exactly what was going on before the wars in iraq and afghanistan now we do have a clip of this documentary that you filmed want to take a look at and then we'll talk more about the documentary and the way c.n.n. reacted to it. the protesters seem to have disappeared from bob greene's capital

thanks to the intense military crackdown. we ventured into another side of. a side the government didn't want the world to see to find out where they've gone we drove to shia villages passing military checkpoints as we left the capital. with these protesters for a little bit. this is what the protest looks like today young boys who been people here. now the documentary that we just saw a clip of never aired and never aired on c.n.n. international why not. well i still haven't been given an exact reason as to why why it didn't air i went and visited with the president of c.n.n. international tony maddox twice on behalf of my dumbfounded crew and we were never

given an answer and so i started investigating the situation liz after several employees who bennett the network for years approached me and said you need to look into this there's something going on it's very strange they're not airing your documentary and after some investigation we found out that c.n.n. international is actually making money from the buffering regime they are a customer of buffering bahrain is paying c.n.n. international to create content that shows bahrain in a favorable light and then they are also not only to create that content list to then air that content on c.n.n. international and one of the shows it was called i list off reign it was back in two thousand and ten it was sponsored by frame and richard quest was live from the country for a week talking about the formula one race then how progressive bufferin work was

and how the crown prince was a reformer well we saw in february two thousand and eleven that under the crown prince's rule the military troops shot and killed unarmed protesters and broad daylight and this is very dangerous because what c.n.n. is doing and they're not only taking money from just rain they've also produced similar content for georgia kazakhstan and other nations as well lebanon and what makes this dangerous is they're not disclosing to the viewers that these sponsored programs are actually being sponsored or if they are disclosing it it's a very small gray lettering at the bottom of the article and that's dangerous not only to our foreign policy but once again and in. making the american public and the public in general that's. watching this network think that there are rosy situations happening in these countries when that's not the case as we've seen with buffering and and it's defrauding viewers and it's defrauding their own journalists

i was not told as a journalist working at the network that this was going on it wasn't clearly disclosed to me that at the same time i was investigating the buffering regime buffering was a paying customer at c.n.n. and you did this all you found this out all through your own research what did c.n.n. tell you in terms of that when you were like hey why aren't you playing my documentary that i you know. danger and to to bring this story and what what did they tell you as to you know why they weren't playing it well that's what made me more suspicious is because they never gave us an answer they never told us why they weren't weren't playing it even though i asked the head of c.n.n. and international twice about it and even bosses above me told me they didn't have answers for me and i'd have to go searching for those answers so so that pretty much as an investigative reporter tells me that something's going on and so on behalf of my crew who you know we got to get to the bottom of things we had fixers

and drivers in rain who are currently now have been laid off because they helped us film the documentary some who are continually still harassed doctors without borders employee who actually drove us into these villages to show us doctors who'd been beaten by security forces he risked his safety several months after our documentary his home was burnt down and part activists say because he helped c.n.n. with that documentary and these sources these people on the ground did not know that at the same time c.n.n. was taking money from this regime to make rosie content that would negate their content and they risked their lives and i feel like c.n.n. owes them an apology. gee as well as an apology to viewers and its own journalists for for defrauding them with this information. really really eye opening and really

appreciate you coming on the show and and telling us all about this that was amber lyon three time emmy award winning journalist photographer and filmmaker thanks for having me on appreciate. the united states is against exploiting children rag so why did president obama waive sanctions on countries that use child soldiers in fact it's the third year in a row that he's done so on friday afternoon president obama signed a presidential memorandum that waves penalties on countries that use child soldiers libya south sudan and yemen we're all saying shouldn't under the child soldiers protection act of two thousand and eight that law blocks funding for u.s. military education training and other aid to countries that use children under the age of eighteen as soldiers human rights activists say failure to enforce these sanctions allows the exploitation of children to go watch and they say it's also a contradiction to the ideals the president preacher has last week president obama signed an executive order to fight human trafficking. well looming budget cuts are

expected to be a major talking point on the campaign trail that's because of congress can't compromise on how to resolve the nation's debt problem the result would be a sequel story shown or about half a trillion dollars in mandatory cuts the defense budget over the coming decade to break it down for you the defense budget would be cut an additional fifty additional fifty five billion dollars per year over four hundred ninety two billion dollars would be cut from the military over the next ten years we're looking at a twenty percent reduction of department defense spending so that's one hundred thousand soldiers sailors marines and airmen would be separated from service cuts to spending on military equipment in the loss of over one million private sector jobs now this would start in january and top officials say such a drastic cuts poses a grave danger to the nation's security but we all know that military spending in the u.s. is massive so what would these cuts really mean to answer that question i was

joined by tim cavanaugh managing editor for reason dot com yours is take. what it would mean as you said fifty five billion a year is easily absorbed if your goal is to make sure the united states is safe from foreign attack i mean with even without seacoast ration somehow we manage not to have enough security around our embassy in libya fifty five billion a year can you know it's a few airplanes it is not even a submarine which who knows what submarines are even defending us from anymore it's absurd that we are in this situation where this is considered catastrophic you know an eight point two percent reduction it's not these are never really cuts they're actually reductions in the rate of growth so this is there is nothing to fear here what we have to fear is if the situation if they do solve this problem because we're just going to be looking at more growth more debt and more spending as time

goes on we've got a sixteen trillion dollar debt in this country sixty more than sixty percent of all new debt is now being bought by the federal reserve with no it's not even being bought by traditional bondholders and we have a and a huge sense spending problem in this country and if sequester ration is what we need to do to at least try to pretend to get it under control then there's nothing to complain about now you're saying that you know what this might not be such a such a big deal but we're hearing from people like senator john mccain he's saying that this could quote lead to an inability to defend the nation and we have defense secretary leon panetta saying that if i didn't bite aggression and sell a lot of catastrophic scenarios that they are portraying what do you think about what they're saying there is a catastrophic because of the way that's a question has been done it's a thing that goes back to one thousand nine hundred five to what's called the graham rudman hollings act and the idea is that if all of the different levels

of spending are a large appropriation something like that if. all those different areas of spending cut into more than the congress has already agreed is our spending limit for the year and it's one point two trillion that's a lot of money already on top of sixteen trillion dollars in debt if it comes to more than that and you sequester what's left over you sequester the overage basically that's what it means but over the years of as these things always do they've added more and more things to the you know do not cut with social security doesn't get sequestered lots of defense stuff doesn't get sequester mean unnecessary defense stuff doesn't get this done so why should i you know older viewers may remember that in the one nine hundred ninety s. there was a so-called shutdown of the government when newt gingrich and bill clinton came to blows they couldn't it when the other world was and i didn't even notice it nobody noticed i mean i did not lose an minute of sleep i didn't eat a morsel less food and nobody did around the country and it was no problem ok you

talked about this national debt it's pretty pretty bad right now it exceeds the america's g.d.p. so even if seaquest ration does happen does that come even close to really addressing the debt problem no no i mean this is the this is the that we're even having this discussion that we're talking about you know the people talking about the congressional staffers having to be having to be reduced or work you know partial hours or something like that like this is this big catastrophe that we're all looking at and when we're looking at a much bigger catastrophe and fewer and fewer people want to buy our debt and we are issuing more of it every day and there is no serious plan out there romney does not have a serious plan but even that is more serious than obama's plan the senate has not even passed a budget in two or three four years something like that this is this is insane and we just cannot go on like this and you know about another thing that the defense of

defense department is saying another cat is. a consequence of a possible seaquest ration is that there will be a lot of jobs lost up particularly in the defense industry and they're saying that this could. create a domino effect and hurt our already fragile economy do you see that being a big risk once again older viewers may remember in the one nine hundred ninety s. we had a big what they called the peace dividend when you know lots of bases closed and lots of contractors had to find other things to do with their time and then actually the economy boomed and you know why we have an active question the purpose of the armed services is just to defend this country it's not to create jobs the military is not a jobs program and you know with all due respect i don't want to see soldiers airmen sailors laid off but we're long way from that we might be talking about some contractors losing things there was a scandal about that just the other day president obama issued these orders to

contractors wait till the election before announcing your light off so you know so . maybe something would be happening along those lines but again this is what i mean is defense contractors like lockheed martin suffering possibly possibly suffering yes i have a terrible feeling that they will solve this problem prior to january do you think that you have your faith and congress know i have no faith in congress i don't want them to solve the problem i want them to get to the fiscal cliff we need to go off the fiscal cliff we're not going to get spending under control in this country if we don't. well now because of this looming debt crisis that's possible seaquest range and we are hearing talk of the debt crisis do you think that it's forcing government officials on both sides now to focus on on this national debt problem. and i hope i mean they they should be focused on it but what we're talking about is not solving the debt problem what they need to do is if this is a problem if we're going to get to this problem where there are appropriating more

than the limit then the spending limit they need to appropriate. les they need to do it the rational way the way anybody else does when they can a bunch of you have one point two trillion dollars to spend in a year that's a lot of money and if you can't get the fixing the dome on the capitol building or whatever it is that they're talking about these big catastrophes we're going to deal with if you can get that within a one point two trillion dollars limit there's something wrong there's something there are a lot more wrong than just the inability to work in a bipartisan manner to get around kosik lustration ok well you're saying seaquest ration is not even enough does not even come close to addressing that's very dire budget crisis as a but then it needs to be done because it sounds like you're talking about massive massive cuts one thing that could happen is we need to go back to what the original idea was with this quest ration which was that everything gets cut even you you don't leave anything out you put social security on the table you put everything

else on the table and all of those things get reduced again but we took almost always in d.c. when people talk about cuts they're actually just talking about reducing the increases at the rate that you're increasing and that's what they define as a cut so we need to get we need to get that out of our heads and we need to get the idea that you're going to actually spend less this year than you spent last year on doing it i don't know about you but most people out there are making less than they were a few years ago so they're spending less and that was can cavanagh imagining editor for reasons that dot com. president obama has promised time and time again to crack down on the wrongdoings of wall street and a state of the union address he vowed that a residential mortgage backed securities taskforce would investigate the people who created and sold worthless bonds. this settlement also protects our ability to further investigate the practices that caused this mess and this is important the mortgage fraud task force i announced in my state of the union address retains its

full authority to aggressively investigate the packaging and selling of risky mortgages that led to this crisis. this kind of reckless behavior that contributed to the financial collapse in two thousand and eight but here we are nine months later and co-chair of the group a new york attorney general eric schneiderman has filed charges against bear stearns the now defunct company bought out by j.p. morgan now this is a civil case which means no one will be serving jail time so is this really the kind of justice president obama promised or is election season is this just election season the after ics shock more about this david dein blogger firedoglake has been following the story very closely and has here now to talk more about it thanks for joining us there david so i stuff want to ask you what exactly bear stearns is being accused of. well they're accused of putting together these

mortgage backed securities deals around the height of the housing bubble and they made representations to investors that they would ensure the quality of the loans in the deal would match the underwriting guidelines that were put together in all the associated materials and what they're accused of is not doing that they allow defective loans that did not meet the guidelines into the deal they were rated their third party due diligence specialist who they hired to look at the quality of the loans and told them to you know ramp up the machine and make these loans go you know underwrite them faster and and finally they when they did find loans that were completely defective that had actually gone into default within the first thirty to ninety days of the loan they entered into settlements with those

originators and they did not use the money in the settlement and give it to the investors who were owed it because they own the loans at that point so they are accused of sort of double dipping in that case not passing along the money in these repurchases on to the investors who are owed it now we're talking about you know individual mortgages but when it happens on a large scale. what does that do the do to the economy. i'm sorry to say again i mean well this is this has been blamed basically for contributing to the financial collapse of two thousand and eight why is that. well absolutely we're talking about large numbers when you know the price of mortgage backed securities the risk was not really priced into the deal and if you look at this situation you know why the bear stearns and other people like them that sold

these mortgage backed securities made representations that these were much safer products and that increases demand for these products and then ng in turn increased housing prices and created this bubble as more and more loans were being sold to feed this securitization machine and as a result you had a situation where prices went up and up and up and finally when they went up no longer they crashed in this caused a massive amount of pain that went throughout the economy and all of these loans are a substantial amount of these loans ended up failing now many people were expecting criminal charges for some of the bankers but this is a civil case so that means nobody is going to go to jail do you think that criminal charges should be filed should people be going to generally. certainly but they weren't i mean this is that the task force that you talked about has not issued one

criminal subpoena yet all of the subpoenas have been civil i mean this case largely peeled off a number of other cases that private litigants had brought investors and bond insurers a long time ago and this kind of a case could have been filed probably two years ago there's nothing in this case it's anything new it's all stuff that we knew about in terms of what bear stearns and all of the banks and frankly were doing in misrepresenting the quality of their security so their customers the ambac case which was a bond insurer was the main case that this was modeled under and that woman who filed that case now works in eric schneiderman office so obviously this could have been put together two years ago it's a civil case and not a criminal case and it looks to me like it's something where you know because the federal groups didn't even volved themselves in it in terms of doing

a parallel proceeding it just looks like a situation where schneiderman needed something to go it's a month before the election there were a lot of questions about whether this task force was even a real thing and he took something off the shelf that could have been filed a couple years earlier and that has actually implications because of the statute of limitations is it enables us only to cover within this lawsuit a small portion of the loans that were produced in this period and then you know that's a thank you all been waiting for almost a year now for a lawsuit from the r n b s working group is it possible that did are really that they really need all that time to make this case. i don't think so i mean the subpoenas that ultimately were issued that relate to this case were issued in april of two thousand and eleven now what schneiderman says is that he needed the federal support to go through the cases and support them and everything but

a lot of this information was in the public domain the financial crisis inquiry commission put together a report in two thousand and eleven january of two thousand and eleven that explained all of this third party due diligence work that was being done fraudulent lee by the late people like bear stearns and all of this information was public in fact clayton holdings which is the main third party due diligence firm in this case was subject to cooperation agreement with the new york attorney general's office that predate schneiderman when it was from andrew cuomo time and the new york attorney general's office so all of this information was out there this case should have been brought a couple years ago and i'm still not satisfied that the federal task forces is really doing anything of value to get us to the bottom of this it's nice that they're putting a cage together that follows on some other good work that people are doing but i

would have expected this even more all right and you had touched upon this earlier the timing the timing of this case and of course where in the thick of election season when we have that first debate coming tomorrow so is this a political move now everything's political rights so obviously if you're looking for an october surprise the calendar switch to october first and voila we have a case there that it we've got our act over surprised well a very interesting and really appreciate you coming on the show david that with david dein he's a blogger for firedoglake thank you. and that is going to do it for now but for more of the stories we've covered you can check out our you tube channel that youtube dot com slash or as he america you can also check out our web site that's our t.v. dot com slash usa and you can also follow me on twitter at liz wall for now have a great night.